Not sure how to deal with these common learning and development challenges? We show you how.
Each L&D team, and each organisation, is different.
Each will have its strengths, its weaknesses and of course, it’s challenges.
But it’s safe to say that learner engagement is probably the biggest challenge that L&D teams face.
But it’s not the only one.
And as technology and businesses develop, that list seems to get longer and longer.
So what are you meant to do?
In this blog, we’ll run through:
- What learning and development is [in case you weren’t sure…]
- The biggest L&D challenges in 2026
- Plus, how to overcome each challenge for greater success
Let’s get started.
💡 Pro Tip
Already know that the right LMS is the solution to all of your biggest L&D challenges?
At BuildEmpire, we pride ourselves on our savvy dev team who can customise your Totara platform to do well, anything you want it to.
See some of our work in practice
What is learning and development?
Learning and development is part of an organisation that empowers employees to grow and develop their knowledge, skills, and abilities for better business performance and career prospects.
And that’s not all.
Related: The key benefits of learning and development
[If you’re an L&D professional, don’t worry, you can skip to the next section. Chances you know all of this already…]
The L&D team can sit within the HR team or as a separate entity.
Learning and development team responsibilities can cover:
- Onboarding and new hire orientation
- Career development
- Statutory and mandatory training
- Ongoing training and development
- Skills training
- Talent strategy, and more
What are the biggest challenges L&D professionals face in 2026?
✅ Tight budgets
✅ Learner engagement
✅ Scaling L&D
✅ Training effectiveness
✅ Measuring learner ROI
✅ High turnover
✅ Employees not having time for learning
✅ Responding at the speed of need
✅ Linking performance to learning
9 learning and development challenges professionals face in 2026
L&D professionals focus their efforts on creating good learning experiences for employees in their organisations.
But with this comes many barriers.
These challenges can be difficult to overcome, especially without the right tools and processes in place.
Luckily, we’re here to help.
With our expertise in the L&D sector, we show you exactly how to bypass common challenges you might be facing in your day-to-day role.
These L&D challenges tend to include:
- Tight budgets
- Scaling learning and development
- Training effectiveness
- Learner engagement
- Measuring learner ROI
- High turnover
- Employees not having time for learning
- Responding at the speed of need
- Linking performance to learning
Let’s look at them one by one in more detail to discuss why they’re an issue and how to overcome them.
Tight budgets
Every department feels the budget squeeze at some point. But L&D is often the first to be scrutinised and the first to be cut.
With this comes added pressure to learning and development professionals.
And while it might feel counterintuitive to suggest a new LMS when you’re looking at a reduced budget, long-term it makes sense.
With the right LMS in place, you can save time and money.
60% of training costs can be attributed to travel. An LMS allows you to house some of your learning content online so that it can be accessed anywhere.
An LMS can also help you hit compliance rates and avoid costly mistakes.
But that’s not all.
You can use Totara’s audience tool to automatically assign your learners to the correct audience based on predetermined demographics and criteria.
From here, you can auto-assign audiences to new learning courses and programmes meaning learners can manage their own progression.
With our customised learning interface, your learners can easily find content and programmes meaning a reduced learning curve and more time back in your hands.
Consolidating your data and integrating your key tools within your LMS makes the platform a hub of resources full of automated processes pushing and pulling data to and from your most important tools. This means more money and more time can be spent on what truly matters.
Plus of course, the right LMS can help your business outcomes.
Whether that’s improving onboarding, reducing turnover, or supporting development that leads to more efficient/improved working, this can all impact revenue.
Scaling learning and development
Taking on a new L&D project can feel daunting. But when you’re supported by the right tool, it can become a much easier feat.
There might be a few reasons why you need to scale your L&D. Perhaps you’re taking your learning global, selling your content or simply hiring at a rapid rate.
Whatever the reason, the right LMS makes it easy.
You can use your LMS to support by:
- Automating mundane processes giving you more time to spend on strategy and execution of content
- Create personalised content for learners and use different dashboards for different audiences to focus employees and engage them
- Easily offering globalised learning in a variety of languages
Training effectiveness
82% of organisations now use an LMS to optimize their training initiatives.
An LMS is a one-stop solution for all of your training needs. It allows you to centralise your learning materials, and your people data.
This makes it easier for you to add, assign and update content, and for learners to engage with it.
Plus, with the right LMS you can create personalised learning paths.
After all, not everyone learns in the same way. And with our content creation tools, you can adjust the pacem content and method of delivery to suit a range of learning preferences.
But most important is analytics itself.
With a BuildEmpire LMS, you can gather the data you need to compile robust reports within a few clicks. It lets you report back on the impact of your learning and spot quick wins for improvement as you develop your L&D strategy.
Learner engagement
There are many features in an LMS that can give learner engagement a boost. But some have more impact than others.
For example, an LMS that offers you the capability to mix learning online and offline like BuildEmpire can help you pair online teaching with on-site assessment or vice versa is a great way to keep learners engaged.
You can also engage learners via gamification using tools like points, leaderboards and badges.
Related: New to BuildEmpire: gamification elements like leaderboards and points
Totara Engage has a plethora of tools that are worth investigating, as these can all be pulled into your core LMS.
💡 Pro Tip
Totara Engage is a great add-on to your core learning platform. You can incorporate a powerful recommendations engine to identify users’ key interests and connect personalised content to their key dashboards.
Learn more about Totara Engage
Measuring learner ROI
Measuring learning ROI on a basic level is easy. You can use a simple formula such as ROI = (Benefits – Costs) / Costs x 100% to calculate the percentage of ROI.
But how are you applying financial data to your benefits?
The best way to do it is to identify drivers of lost productivity and time within your organisation. For example, it might be the time taken to complete tasks due to a lack of technical knowledge of a tool.
Then, of course, you would develop content that alleviates those drivers.
To continue our example from above, that could be creating a course that supports technical ability on that tool.
Lastly is the tricky bit.
You need to quantify the time that’s been recouped.
Usually, the best way to do this is to get clear on your reporting from the off. How long is it taking staff to complete this particular task.
Log it and then find an average.
Right after training, and then a few months later, repeat this process and see how the average time has changed.
Applying a financial figure to this number could work by looking at hourly salary, or applying a base rate to hours spent completing a task.
High turnover
Replacing an employee comes at a significant cost, amounting to approximately 33% of their annual salary.
When there’s such a large amount of money at stake, there is huge potential for learning and development to positively impact their organisation.
More than 93% of employers believe that onboarding plays a critical role in an employee’s decision to stay or leave the company. And it’s no surprise.
Onboarding is a great way to:
- Integrate new starters into company culture
- Upskill employees on new tools and processes
- Give new starters a sense of belonging
- Create more understanding of an employee’s job expectations
By 2025, the value of the onboarding software market is expected to reach $1.35 billion, so the value of good onboarding is clear.
But your luck is in.
Good onboarding is possible right in your LMS.
Totara Learn supports efficient onboarding processes by helping organisations to:
- Standardise and automate the onboarding processes
- Facilitate the onboarding process
- Identify training needs before the first day of employment for a smooth first day
- Move new starters seamlessly into new hire training
- Reduce one-to-one training from senior managers
All of this can help new starters get started quicker and evolve into high flyers with greater ease.
Employees not having time for learning
Time-strapped employees can be a huge challenge for L&D teams.
But there are a number of ways to better support those who don’t seem to have time for learning.
Firstly, you can create learning that works on their terms. Formal in-person training is going to be difficult for time strapped employees to attend. Instead, opt for on-demand training and microlearning to let your learners enrol on their own terms and timescales.
You can also personalise LMS homepages and dashboards to push relevant learning content. This can be a great way to remind users to complete training.
Lastly, managers need to spearhead engagement in learning.
One easy way to achieve this is to offer great reporting.
Take our compliance reporting dashboard.
Within that, managers can see where their teams are up to and which members are falling behind.
That allows them to better manage them and support them to prioritise learning.
Responding at the speed of need
Successful L&D teams need to be agile.
Changes in the business like new products, processes and regulations means updates to learning content. And so, as an L&D leader, you need to be ready with new content.
To combat this, make learning a two-way street.
Open up learning requests to your wider organisation and use their knowledge to stay informed.
Secondly, make microlearning a priority.
If you already have a lot of long-form content, then work on breaking that down into bitesize chunks. This will make it easier to create, and also, easier to digest.
Linking performance to learning
There’s no point assigning learning to your employees for the sake of it.
As the tools available to L&D teams evolve, there’s more scope to better connect learning to performance.
And for good reason.
Individually, they’re great, but together they’re better.
Learning guides goals and aims, while performance gives you key targets to reach for that support wider business aims.
With a Totara-based LMS, you can easily connect the two. Totara Perform is a great add-on to any Totara Learn system that allows you to add in performance reviews, goals and competencies and more.
💡 Pro Tip
With Totara Perform in play, you can create evidence-based performance reviews, get an objective view of employee performance and quickly identify and close skills gaps to improve business outcomes.
Learn more about Totara Perform
Overcome key learning and development challenges with the right LMS
While there are plenty of tactics are tricks you can adopt to improve your function, the best way to take your learning experience to the next level is to implement the right LMS.
With it, you can access all the tools you need, and work closely with a team of developers for support, innovation and guidance.
BuildEmpire prides itself on its version of Totara. An interface with design and user experience at its hearth plus access to tools that allow you to get more out of your product.
Book a demo to see how BuildEmpire could help you improve your L&D strategy.
FAQs
What is the biggest L&D challenge?
The biggest learning & development challenge in 2026 is adapting training to the hybrid + AI-driven workplace, where traditional on-the-job learning is being disrupted.
Junior staff are losing informal mentorship opportunities due to remote work, while AI automates routine tasks and gone are the chances to “learn by doing.”
Organisations must redesign L&D with structured mentoring, immersive simulations, and intentional skill-building to help employees develop critical judgment and adapt to AI-enhanced roles
What role does AI play in L&D?
AI helps personalise learning, automate assessments, and identify skill gaps. But, it also requires L&D teams to rethink how employees gain complex, hands-on experience.
How do you measure success of L&D?
By tracking metrics like employee performance, skill development, course completion rates, engagement levels, and business impact.